


Origins

by Azzandra



Series: The Crimson Cloak [2]
Category: Girl Genius (Webcomic)
Genre: Family Issues, Gen, Growing Up in Mechanicsburg
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-15
Updated: 2018-09-15
Packaged: 2019-07-12 17:36:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,678
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16000073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Azzandra/pseuds/Azzandra
Summary: Growing up in Mechanicsburg wasn't all bad, but it was the kind of childhood that would makeanyonewant to adopt a secret identity and perform heroics without their father's knowledge.





	1. Home

For as long as Agatha could remember, the limits of her world were the walls of Mechanicsburg.

It was not a bad place to grow up, by any stretch. In its own way, Mechanicsburg was the perfect place to entertain a very young Spark, and between the Castle and the townsfolk and the Jägers, Agatha managed that perfect balance of finding trouble and never actually suffering real harm.

But growing up, Agatha also became aware, slowly and increasingly, of the existence of a world beyond Mechanicsburg's walls. The maps and atlases that Uncle Barry would unroll in the library as he tutored her in geography held a fascination all of their own, and Agatha remembered the dusty smell and the crinkle of paper as she placed her finger on different spots and asked Uncle Barry about what could be found there, and who, and what language they spoke, and what they'd invented.

It was a fascination that Uncle Barry indulged, until he realized it went deeper than her father would abide. The geography lessons became far more structured after the first time Agatha asked Bill to go outside Mechanicsburg's walls.

In Agatha's early memory, her father loomed silent and stern, hardly ever looking at her. When she would grow older, she'd understand that it was hard for him to look at her in those days because she reminded him of her mother, and he'd only grown more at ease with Agatha after she grew into her own person.

But at the time, it felt like rejection, and as a young child, Agatha often found herself tip-toeing around her father the way she never did around other adults. Uncle Barry always assured her that her father loved her, and sometimes Agatha believed him, but she still approached her father rarely, and hesitantly when she actually worked up the nerve.

Sometimes, even in those early days, Father would pick her up, and hold her in his lap, and speak to her slowly and choosing his words carefully. She could pick out the silver in his hair even then; he'd already been getting on in years when she was born, but something else seemed to have aged him in the meantime. He always had dark circles under his eyes.

It was on one of these occasions, on her father's lap, that Agatha asked if she could go to one of the places Uncle Barry had shown her on the map. It had been something of an idle question, and she couldn't even remember which place she asked about. It hardly mattered. Father paused for a long time before he finally answered that she'd go when she was older, and even when questioned further, he wouldn't say how old.

Agatha got the vague sense she'd upset him with the question, though she didn't understand why or how.

She understood, eventually, that very few people left the town at all. Usually, if they did, it was because they had a job to do on the outside, and even then, they were trusted to return as soon as it was done.

Sometimes her father and Uncle Barry left as well, on secret errands, to meet specific people about things.

Once in a while, people from the outside would come as well. They were almost always strange and wonderful, and Uncle Barry explained they were friends that he and her father had met during adventuring.

In trickles and eavesdropped conversations, Agatha learned about the Wulfenbach Empire, growing all around Mechanicsburg. It was what worried her father, and made him keep the town locked up. Klaus Wulfenbach had been a friend, and now he was an enemy. Or, not an enemy; because Father seemed to go back and forth on that.

It was one of the questions Agatha learned not to ask. If nothing else, she learned quickly.

And to a child with such expansive curiosity as Agatha, it wasn't hard to learn that there were easier ways to get out of Mechanicsburg than there were to get in.

 

* * *

The first time Agatha managed to sneak out, she was ten, and she only got several steps beyond the wall before she crouched in the shrubbery and listened to the wild thudding of her own heart and the rush of blood in her ears.

Her father was away from Mechanicsburg again, doing whatever he did when he was away, and Agatha decided this was as good of an opportunity she was going to get for sneaking out. She'd had it planned for weeks. Months. Ever since she tagged one of the smuggling crews with one of her dingbots, and learned how they went in and out of the town.

Now that she was actually outside, where she was definitely not allowed to be, she kept having the irrational thought that her father would come along any moment and catch her.

And yet, it was exhilarating. Agatha kicked a rock, and then broke out into a sprint along the wall, through the grass. It was so lush and untamed out here, nothing like the carefully controlled growth of the Greens, or the manicured lawn of Tiny Monster Island, or the small enclosed gardens that some townsfolk kept and tended to carefully.

She was still giggling to herself as she circled back to the secret entrance. Or, at least, where she thought she remembered the secret entrance was.

She ran her hands over the stones of the wall, trying to remember the exact spot she'd come out through, but the wall was seamless, and stubbornly shut. 

"Castle?" she said quietly, as she felt the first twinge of actual worry.

The Castle did not respond, though Agatha couldn't determine whether this was because it truly couldn't hear her, or because it would be a funny joke to play on her.

Her palms pressed more urgently against the wall.

"Iz a bit to de left," came the helpful suggestion.

Agatha squeaked in surprise, and whipped around to face the speaker.

Ognian was cleaning the underside of his nails with a knife, casually disinterested in his surroundings. Agatha hadn't even spotted him there, leaning in the shadow of a stubby little tree that had been growing crooked in the shadow of the wall.

Agatha opened her mouth, wanting to ask what he was doing there, but then, she already knew. Of course the Jägers would know her every move. It wasn't like they had a lot of stuff to do. So instead, the words stumbling out of her mouth were,

"Are you going to tell Father?"

Ognian paused to actually look at her, his lips pursing.

"Vot Mazter Bill doezn't know ken't hurt him, Hy think," Ognian replied.

It reassured Agatha as much as it could have, and then Ognian showed her how to open the entrance again.

They walked quietly through Mechanicsburg's tunnels for a while, before Agatha dared broach the question.

"Didn't Father order all the Jägers to never leave town?" 

"Hmph. He did," Ognian confirmed.

"But you followed me out," she said.

"Mazter Bill alzo ordered uz to alvays protect hyu," Ognian replied, looking unusually somber, "und chust becauze ve iz Jägerkin, doezn't mean ve dun know how to uze our heads--"

"Uh--"

"--for tings odder den hitting tings vit dem," Ognian continued, pointedly ignoring Agatha's small smile. "Between de choize ov two orders, ve know vhich Mazter Bill vould care more about uz following, und vhich he vould forgiff uz breaking."

Agatha ducked her head, feeling embarrassed and oddly warmed. She was at times unsure what she even thought about her father, but it was nice to know the Jägers would always be there for her, having her back.

 

* * *

No, growing up in Mechanicsburg was not so bad at all. There were entire room in the Castle that Agatha would see for the first time in centuries, and then never again. There was a maze of tunnels under the town, sewers and crypts and lost labs and monster lairs. There were the children, who ran in packs and got their sticky hands into everything and followed in Agatha's wake like flocks of birds switching direction in the air and always managing to take turns in concert.

There was the library, in late morning tutoring lessons with Uncle Barry, and the labs after she broke through, and then there was Mamma Gkika's, where Agatha went for scrapes and bruises that she acquired during play, and where large mugs of juice or warm drinks would always be waiting for her. There was the one roof of Castle Heterodyne that was perfect for sledding in the winter, and the sandy stretch of the Dyne where all the kids would go to splash around and bother the ducks during the hottest days of summer.

But everything Mechanicsburg was, had to be between its walls. The town dug down, and built upwards, and bricked over, and moved over its buildings, re-shuffling as needed, and sometimes Agatha loved it for the strange quirks of architecture and the strange quirks of personality it created, but other times... she didn't have enough room to breathe. Everything new was also familiar, and she wasn't sure she could live like that forever. And despite everything that Father said, it did feel like she would live there forever.

It was almost easy, really, to figure out how people were going in and out. Nobody had to tell her, because all it took was putting together some observations she'd made over the years.

So at ten, she stepped out of Mechanicsburg for the first time. And then the second. And the third, all when she was still ten. She ran through the open fields outside Mechanicsburg like possessed, driven by the heady excitement of doing something forbidden. She developed a short-lived fascination with the local flora, and then, as she walked the fields and observed the strangely uneven terrain--overgrown mounds and hillocks where old armies and siege weaponry had dug their trenches or overturned the earth--she also began taking an interest in history.

The library had plenty of books on the subject of history, from a variety of perspectives. The Jägers were a more interesting source, but of wildly differing levels of reliability.

And then, in a steady shift, her interests moved towards modern politics, a subject that Uncle Barry admitted he wasn't terribly well-versed in. 

"Then who is well-versed in politics?" Agatha asked quite reasonably, as she turned over to him a book on statecraft in the time of the Storm King. Someone had scribbled out every mention of Andronicus Valois' name and replaced it with a rude word in Hungarian. The book was almost one thousand pages long, so that took some dedication. 

Uncle Barry took the book and leafed through it with his brows knitting together. Agatha didn't know if that was because of the book defacement, or her question.

"Well, Bill has been on something of a political tear lately," Uncle Barry said, smiling ruefully. Then he seemed to think better of it, probably because he wasn't suppose to tell Agatha about anything he and Father were doing when they left the town. "No, probably not Bill," Uncle Barry muttered as an after-thought. "Carson, maybe. You are going to have to learn how to rule Mechanicsburg, anyway."

That was not precisely what Agatha had in mind--her interest was more in anywhere _but_ Mechanicsburg--however, she couldn't argue against it. And at any rate, Uncle Barry wasn't wrong.

So, as soon as Uncle Barry could have a word with the seneschal, Agatha started new tutoring lessons.

 

* * *

Carson von Mekkhan was very old, and he had actual hopes of retirement one day, so joining Agatha for the lessons was his grandson, Vanamonde. Carson griped that between the two of them, they'd run him ragged, but the opposite turned out to be more true, since Carson also turned out to be quite the harsh taskmaster.

He had books Agatha had never seen, dusty giant tomes and sewn together old treatise, and the journals of old seneschals before him. His daughter-in-law came from a long line of booksellers, meaning that when the Heterodynes raided and pillaged, it was the Heliotropes' job to sort through anything written, keep what might be useful in Mechanicsburg, and then sell off on the black market anything else.

The way Carson explained it, a lot of family lineages in Mechanicsburg were dedicated to the Heterodynes in this way: generation and generation of smiths, or monster-wranglers, or graverobbers. A lot of the more specialized ones had had to give up their old work when the Heterodyne Boys turned the town around, and Agatha had a very strange mental image after hearing her father and uncle referred to as 'boys'.

The salient fact was that Carson turned out to be quite the treasure trove of information. He knew things about Mechanicsburg that Agatha wouldn't have even guessed, and Agatha discovered that with just a few leading questions, she could get him to expound on any number of topics about the world outside Mechanicsburg as well. Carson was one of those adults who had Opinions, and while usually Agatha found that sort of thing boring, it was different when the subject an adult had Opinions on was actually interesting to her.

She learned all manner of things about Europa, and England, and the Ice Lords, and Paris, and the Wulfenbach Empire that she wouldn't have otherwise. She even heard about things far afield, such as the Americas, though Carson indicated that she was best off asking Uncle Barry about the more distant places.

And Agatha used to, before Father put an end to it because it was making her ask uncomfortable questions. He didn't like her concerning herself too much with the outside world.

Which was what made it a tense moment when Father walked in on the lesson just as Carson was expounding on the Wulfenbach Empire's policy of conditional aggression and what it meant for Mechanicsburg. 

She and Van were sitting at a table in the Heliotrope bookshop, Carson in his rocking chair with the cat on his lap. Father probably wanted to talk to Carson about something, and hadn't meant to interrupt the lesson. But his jaw tensed in that way it did when he was unhappy about something and trying not to show it, and Agatha just knew he'd try to put an end to the lessons now. Van must have noticed, because he tapped his foot against hers under the table in sympathy.

Later that night, she crept along the beams of the Cauldron Room, where Uncle Barry and her father were cooking up some new experiment; it smelled like soup.

She managed to sneak just close enough to hear them talk about precisely what interested her.

"She's a young Spark, Bill," Uncle Barry was saying, as he stirred the soup. He had a pair of goggles on, and the lenses reflected the glow of the liquid. "You can't just constantly forbid her from learning things. She needs constant input to keep her mind busy. And besides," Uncle Barry pulled the goggles off his eyes, pushing them to his forehead as he turned to Father, "if you don't talk to Agatha about these things, someone else will, and you might not like what they tell her."

Even from afar, Agatha could see Father's jaw clench in distaste. He pretended to be too absorbed in a pile of papers, but she was sure he heard. Father always turned taciturn when something displeased him, and Agatha had gotten used to his prolonged periods of silence.

The lessons, at least, didn't stop.

And in the face of this perceived victory, Agatha began to get bolder about her sneaking out.

 

* * *

The nearest town, by Agatha's calculations, was too far to get there by foot and back before she was missed. A bit of scrounging through Castle Heterodyne found her all manner of transport, including old Bob Heterodyne's rocket-powered unicycle.

She did not take the unicycle. Partly because she didn't trust her balance on it without some practice first, but also because when she started it up, it backfired so hard that it flew across the room and shattered a cabinet. Agatha didn't intend for her bones to be next.

She did find a pedal-glider that could work. It seemed incomplete, like a young Heterodyne had started tinkering on it and lost interest just before finishing it. She had no trouble at all turning it into something functional. The Castle even offered a nearby window if she wanted to test it. Agatha politely declined, because she already knew exactly how and where she was going to test it.

So, on a day when the tailwinds were favorable and the Jägers were willing to cover for her, Agatha glided all the way to a town down the mountain.

She stashed the pedal-glider in a bush before going into town, just to be less conspicuous, but she didn't think she managed it because she was giggling the entire time she was there. That would have drawn attention enough, but she was also young and unaccompanied, and she realized belatedly that it might have been a hasty decision. What if her father came through this town on his way back, and heard her description from the townsfolk, and she got in trouble?

Even as she knew it was irrational, Agatha spooked and turned back.

Jenka and Füst were waiting by her glider.

"Didn't tink hyu vere goink anyvhere alone, did hyu?" Jenka asked, amused when Agatha sputtered defensively.

"I just wanted to have a look around," she said.

"Hm. Vell, dere iz a feztival dey hold in de fall here, if hyu vant to do de looking vitout sticking out?" Jenka offered.

Agatha couldn't help it; she broke into a grin, even if her face was already aching from grinning all day.

 

* * *

The first time Agatha saw a Heterodyne show, it was in a small town, during a fair. She didn't stick out so much when there were crowds and crowds of people milling around, and when everyone was celebrating well into twilight, they were also not so observant about the Jägers stalking the roofs and the dark corners.

Agatha ate candied apples and roamed the fairgrounds, and after she helped a harried technician solve a minor problem on a rotary swing, she got tickets for free rides.

But the Heterodyne show was clearly the highlight, and for the first time she saw her father and uncle as Europa saw them, and she was dazzled.

Oh, Father and Uncle Barry would not approve of this. They would not approve at all. But she knew some of the real stories behind the show, and she could tell they'd cobbled together disparate events and characters of people who'd never met each other in real life, and created a story out of it. It was light tricks and funny wigs, all of it, and an audience that participated in the action, all to build up this blatantly fake but far more entertaining version of reality.

It was the crack of dawn by the time Agatha crept back into Mechanicsburg. She was yawning and nodding off on her feet, but her head was abuzz, and the stage lights were still burnt into her retinas as Agatha made it only as far as Mamma Gkika's before falling asleep and being bundled off into the general's bed.

For a while after that, she would ask Uncle Barry about his former heroics, and while she'd gotten little tidbits and anecdotes from him over the years, this was the first time she actually wanted whole stories.

She could see, by the small frown Uncle Barry got, that he was wondering where Agatha had heard about some of the stuff she was asking about. But if he suspected the real source, he didn't prod her about it. Likely he thought she was hiding a stack of Heterodyne Boys novels under her floorboards, not that she was sneaking out. Though the part about the novels was true too.

 

* * *

Agatha was fifteen when it all came to a head. She'd kept the secret for perhaps longer than would have been possible had her father paid closer attention, but eventually, it was always going to come to this.

From the Wastelands, a giant clank emerged, thunderous steps carrying it through a town, completely oblivious to the houses it crushed underfoot. Agatha could feel the ground shake as it progressed, and she ran straight towards it without a second thought. She put together a death ray out of spare parts in her pockets and things she picked up from the wreckage the clank left behind.

And it was effective. Despite the improvisational nature of the death ray, when she set it off on the clank, it cut through it like a hot knife through butter, reducing it to a clump of melted slag in the middle of town.

Agatha was perfectly proud of herself for a split second, before she looked just beyond the slagged metal and saw her father and uncle with their own weapons trained on the remnants of the clank. They'd probably been heading back into Mechanicsburg from their latest trip, and taken a detour to save the town.

Agatha felt ice down her back when she realized Father was staring right in her direction, and she turned on her heel instantly and ran.

She got to Mechanicsburg before Father and Uncle Barry, and holed up in her laboratory to fret. For half an hour, she teetered between anxious anticipation, and an irrational hope that Father wouldn't believe that was really her in town.

She knew how ridiculous that hope had been the minute Father walked into her laboratory and she saw the look on his face.

There was shouting next, most of it Agatha's. Father always got quiet and intense when he was angry, and he spoke in near-whisper, but Agatha had years of bottled up frustrations and prime opportunity to uncork it all at once, and she hated how shrill and shaky her voice got, and how her eyes filled with angry tears, but she said things to her father that she had avoided telling him for years.

She wanted out. She wanted to leave Mechanicsburg. Not permanently, but enough so it didn't feel so stifling all the time. He never told her why she had to stay locked up, other than vague warnings about outside dangers, but she'd seen danger already, hadn't she? Didn't he see how she handled that clank?

Father looked stricken the more she spoke, obviously surprised to hear all about this, but the moment she mentioned the clank, he got angry again.

"You snuck out!" he accused. 

"I didn't sneak!" Agatha retorted. "I just, I left! For a bit! Without mentioning it to you!"

"Without mentioning it to anyone!" Father said.

Agatha opened her mouth to correct him, and hesitated. Father's expression turned stunned.

"People knew?" Father asked, his voice turning quiet again, but losing its edge of madness. "Castle?"

"She's hardly the first heir to go out for a bit of a jaunt," the Castle rumbled, a bit defensive.

Bill's expression hardened again.

"The Jägers?" he asked.

Agatha nodded slowly.

"They just followed me around to keep me safe," she added hurriedly.

"Barry?" Father gritted out between his teeth.

"I don't think he knew," Agatha said, which was true. If Uncle Barry had an inkling of what was going on, he probably never shared it with Bill, but then, he hadn't hinted anything to Agatha either. She tended to sneak out when he was gone away with Father, anyway.

"Alright," Father said, letting out a long breath.

For a moment, Agatha thought he might see reason, and soften up his stance.

"Castle Heterodyne, I forbid you from letting Agatha out of Mechanicsburg until I say otherwise, or unless her safety is contingent on her leaving," Father said, and Agatha felt like the floor had fallen out from under her feet, even though it was still there.

"You can't do that!" Agatha blurted out.

"I can," Father replied coldly, "and for once, the Castle is going to listen."

"I'm sorry, Mistress," the Castle said, "but he _is_ the Heterodyne. And the one thing that we agree on is that we both wish for you to live and carry on the line."

It wasn't like Agatha didn't already know this, but the betrayal still staggered her for a moment. 

"I'm going to have a word with the Jägers next," Father said, and turned to leave.

"But--"

"Agatha, please," he said, sharply turning back towards her. His posture was stiff, hunched in like he was the one getting scolded. "You went behind my back. You're young and maybe you didn't know any better, but they certainly did, and they let you do it anyway." Father's expression softened just a little. "Go to your room. It's late."

And then he just left, and Agatha stayed behind, feeling drained and guilty for all the trouble she'd just gotten the Jägers into.

 

* * *

Eventually, when she thought Father might have calmed down a bit, Agatha went back to all the different ways out she'd found. The Sneaky Gate, the Smuggler's Highway, the one monster tunnel where the roof had collapsed over a brooding wing of the cavern. And in turn, one by one, each passage was now closed to her, and if not closed, then the Castle would make sure it didn't open.

Finding new ways out was not working as well for her as she hoped either, not with the Castle set against her and the Jägers now ordered to stop her. It felt like she couldn't go missing for five minutes before someone came to check on her.

In a fit of pique, she took the sewer entrance into one of the Red Cathedral's old archive rooms, and curled up in a corner with her forehead on her knees, concentrating very hard on not crying in frustration.

That was where Uncle Barry found her, wedged between a bookshelf with dusty old tomes, and an old automated trepanation chair.

Uncle Barry's knees popped in protest as he plunked himself down cross-legged near Agatha, and he grunted a bit with the effort. Agatha pointedly did not express concern, though she peeked at him through her hair.

"You're not going to be stuck in this town forever," Uncle Barry offered, "even though it definitely feels like it right now."

"It's not fair, you and Father left when you were even younger than me!" she burst out, forgoing the silent treatment.

"That... was a bit different," Barry said, as he stared in the middle-distance. "The world was different."

"And your parents were dead," Agatha added darkly.

"Agatha," Uncle Barry said, his tone chiding, "you're not going to have to wait until Bill is dead. Don't worry about that."

Agatha fidgeted with her sleeve as she thought under what circumstances she'd get to leave while Father was still around to stop her. 

"When am I going to be the Heterodyne?" she asked, subdued more than genuinely curious.

"If we do our job right, not before you're ready," Uncle Barry answered. "But one day."

One day. Like one day she'd be allowed to go wherever she wanted.

Uncle Barry cast a look around, his brow furrowing.

"What are you doing here, anyway?" he asked.

Agatha shrugged.

"I know the Castle can't feel or see into parts of the Red Cathedral. I think this is one of the old archive rooms," she said. "I just wanted to get away. I know Father keeps tabs on me."

Uncle Barry gave a short bark of laughter.

"You're right, actually," he said. Likely it was why he'd come to find her; Father got twitchy if he didn't know where she was. "Took us decades to figure that out for ourselves." He cast another look around, probably to make sure there wasn't anything immediately dangerous to her--other than the trepanation chair, but Agatha at least had more sense than to sit in it--and then he gave her a conspiratorial smile. "How about I talk to the Abbess? If you need to get away from Bill for a while, you can come visit her, and nobody's going to come looking. I'll tell Bill you're getting lessons on theology, or something."

Visiting with clergy didn't particularly appeal to Agatha, nor did lessons on theology, but the notion that she'd be somewhere the Castle or her Father couldn't track was at least some sort of relief from the oppressive misery of it all. She nodded, and Uncle Barry ruffled her hair, like he used to do when she was very young. She bore it with dignity.

 

* * *

Agatha had met the Abbess before, and over the years. In their brief interactions, she'd always seemed like a no-nonsense woman, strict and straightforward. 

After Uncle Barry spoke to her, however, and the next time Agatha furtively let herself into the Red Cathedral's archive room again, the Abbess seemed more sympathetic than anything.

"You're not always going to be under your Father's power, child," the Abbess promised, and it didn't feel hollow coming from her. "And if it's leaving Mechanicsburg that you want, then there are smarter and easier ways to go about it."

Agatha stammered something in response, unsure if this was some kind of trick or test, but the Abbess put a finger to her lips, signaling quiet, and gestured for Agatha to follow.

What the Abbess showed her, hidden in the bowels of the Red Cathedral, was a secret door to the world.


	2. Refuge

Agatha balanced herself on a flagpole for a moment before letting herself drop, swinging around it, and hopping onto the building wall, where she stuck using her gloves. She climbed the rest of the way up, enjoying the brisk mountain air, and then she tapped on a window.

This was helpfully opened for her so she could climb inside.

"We have doors, you realize. A lot of them. You're free to use one at any time," she was informed in a deadpan.

"I like the exercise," Agatha replied, taking off her hat and shaking out her hair. 

Martellus snorted in response, but didn't insist on the point. Instead his eyes went to her gloves.

"So they work, then?" he asked, eyes brightening with Spark-fervor.

"They're fantastic!" Agatha gushed, taking off one glove and turning it over to present the gadgets that they'd worked on. "The next version needs to be more resistant to hard impact, but if I turn one on for just a split second before I try to punch something, it gives it a lot more oomph. I knocked the head clean off a clank with this one."

"I don't think we made them with that in mind," Martellus said, squinting at the circular disks attached to the palms of Agatha's leather gloves. "How did it hold up?"

"It didn't. Only good for one punch, I'm afraid."

"Ah."

Indeed, one of the disks had clearly been soldered back together, and tinkered with a bit further. Martellus was just thinking of improvements he'd like to add himself, when he heard the door behind him open and close.

Agatha brightened as she looked over her shoulder.

"Seffie!" she declared, and ran past Martellus to sweep his sister into a hug.

"Agatha! I thought I heard something about a flamboyantly dressed miscreant scaling the walls," Seffie declared, clasping Agatha more delicately in return.

"That doesn't prove it was me. Could have just been a guest to one of your grandma's parties," Agatha said, grinning widely.

They tittered together, terribly amused with themselves, while Martellus sidled up next to them, visibly bothered that Seffie was monopolizing Agatha's attention.

"Oh, Martellus, Agatha hasn't been getting you into trouble, has she?" Seffie raised an eyebrow at him.

Martellus raised his chin, a gesture that managed to focus all of his self-importance in a single expression.

"I'm certain she is worth any trouble," he said, and then sneaked a glance at Agatha as he did so.

If Agatha took it any particular way, he couldn't tell, because she grabbed Seffie by the arm to show her all the gadgets that she and Martellus had been working on. Martellus followed hastily, managing to hover in Agatha's proximity the entire time, or at least until Agatha distracted him with shop talk and they started fuguing together for a bit.

Eventually, Agatha did have to leave, and Martellus was alone with his sister.

Seffie smacked his chest.

"What did I tell you about coming on too strong?" she asked.

Martellus rolled his eyes, before dutifully reciting Seffie's old advice back to her,

"'What a girl with an overbearing father wants the least is an overbearing husband.'"

"Right," Seffie said, and now mollified, began adjusting Martellus' lapels. "Now, you two have a perfectly fine working relationship, and goodness knows there have been marriages built on less. But if you don't stop looming like one of your dogs begging for table scraps, you are going to scare. Her. Away." She emphasized the last three words by poking his chest with her finger.

Martellus scoffed, but he couldn't deny that Seffie might have had the right of it. The truth was, he couldn't really tell if he was making any inroads with the Heterodyne girl. People often criticized _him_ for lacking social skills, but Agatha had been practically feral when they first met. Sometimes even Seffie wasn't sure how to react to some of the things she said or did.

He couldn't see why he shouldn't just propose a mutually beneficial alliance sealed in matrimony to her, but Seffie apparently thought Agatha would just turn him down and then he'd lose his chance at securing her cooperation. He was going to have to, unfortunately, _win her over_ first.

And if helping her with her silly heroics was going to do that, then he supposed there were worse things he'd done for less benefit in the end.


End file.
